Glicera is a young bachelorette excited about the prospect of love and the good life, but when her father dies, she doesn't receive the inheritance she had been expecting from him. The loss is crushing for Glicera, and she begins to feel like the victim of circumstance.
Then one day, to make things worse, a man named Melladore uses her as a lover, under the pretense that he loves her and will marry her, but he abandons her after sex. She is heartbroken, and she can't help but feel that she has been misused because she is not wealthy enough to have earned Melladore's commitment. She becomes vengeful.
Then she encounters an older man who is well to-do and skillful with money, named Grubguard. She allows Grubguard to believe she is interested in him romantically, and she begins manipulating him into helping her with her money troubles, under the pretense now that she loves him, which she does not.
She asks him to help her to acquire the money from Melladore's mortgage, and Grubguard does so, but when she has the cash in hand, she breaks his heart and gives a condescending speech, explaining that she intended to humiliate him, and that she had been using him the whole time. She and her servant, Laphelia, laugh at the poor man.
